[ale] old newbie

[Richard Faulkner]

Ah...how to milk the most mileage out of legacy equipment.  Lord knows
I've done it 
a time or two...

Old IDE drives are in my mind at reasonable risk of failure in the
nearer future than 
new replacement SATA drives.  There are plenty of manufacturers of HDD
enclosures
that will accept either PATA or SATA so that you may attach it to your
PC.  Mine will
take either and I/O to eSATA or USB 2.0 and was dirt cheap.  

As for optical drives...same thing in my mind.  They live only so long
and you may 
be looking for a replacement sooner than later anyway.  (I recently went
through this 
on one of our studio machines).  How much are SATA drives?  Nearly
nothing these 
days.  DVD-RW for $15.00 (the light scribe I just purchased was $17.00
from Newegg).  

If upgrade is what you seek you may be well to consider buying the best
mainboard
you can afford, go for a reasonable CPU that you could upgrade later if
desired (if
that was even necessary) and memory.  Yes, basically build a whole new
system. 
Keep an eye on scalability for the future and aim at uprating that one
instead of the 
one you have.  

Tiger has had some killer barebones deals -- Newegg has a ton too I'm
sure.  That's 
where I'd be looking.  Otherwise I'd look to your old drives as master
back-ups and 
save them for parts if you ever have a need for such technology.  They
do come in 
handy sometimes!  : )

Otherwise, you may want to turn to Ebay for slightly older boards and
may even find
one new in the box.  Legacy technology abounds there and can be had for
a song if
you hunt for it.  

Thus is what I've done (and do).......Rich in Lilburn



-----Original Message-----
From: Cornelis van Dijk <cor.angela0 at gmail.com>
Reply-to: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts <ale at ale.org>
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: [ale] old newbie
Date: Sat, 25 Dec 2010 18:20:47 -0500


Hello alers,

I used to subscribe to this list a few years ago while running SuSE,
Redhat and Fedora.  I have been busy with other things since then. I
recently decided to upgrade my systems and I was appalled at the
changes in the technology. For instance, one can hardly get a
motherboard that has IDE ports on it. Some may have only one. What to
do with my IDE harddrives. and dvd burners, let alone my SCSI
equipment? I have to get all SATA or USB? Even my 2006 Scott Mueller
book  (Upgrading and Repairing PC's) is out of date. Are there
adapters for IDE to SATA  for example. Is there anyone with similar
problems or is there a good site for old newbie's like me?

Thanks,

Cor
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